“Well, we don’t really need a motel. We could just pull over on a back road and catch some Zs, then move on.”
“No way.” She laughed. “I read that book. Some homicidal alien’ll cut us up and eat the pieces.”
“I bet he made that up.” A cockroach came out of a crack in the wall and skipped toward the pizza. I slapped at it and it scuttled back. “Yuck. Kind of glad I missed.” More than an inch long.
“They’re bigger in Florida,” she said.
“Maybe slower, too. Pity I left the gun behind.”
She was staring at the crack. “Maybe we should get one.”
“What?”
“Just a thought. Stupid, I guess.”
It had crossed my mind, too, of course. “Not stupid. But not a rifle. I can’t imagine any scenario where that would work. Maybe a concealable pistol, like a Derringer, if we get cornered.”
“But you can’t just buy one in a store, can you? Without showing ID? The guy in your book, Steve, he had a permit and everything.”
“Yeah, he needed a concealed-weapon permit, which was true down in Florida . . . but when I went down there as a kid, my uncle kept a handgun in his tackle box, and it wasn’t a big deal that he didn’t have a permit; he joked about it with my dad. But I remember he hadn’t bought the gun; it was an old thing he got from his own father.”
“So the trick is to choose your grandparents wisely?”
“Always. There used to be a used-gun section in the want ads. I remember when they stopped doing that, ran a sanctimonious notice for weeks.”
“So it will have to be a back-alley deal,” she said.
“Yeah, and Oak Grove doesn’t even have any front alleys.” I snagged her a glass from the counter and we finished the last of the wine.
It had gotten dark, crickets chirping. Maybe one car a minute went by outside. A quarter moon shone down.
“Glad to be off the road,” she said. “Quiet here.”
She looked good, girlish, just-washed hair back in a ponytail. The neon sign in the window made her skin look warm.
“We could go make some noise.”
It took her a second to react. If she blushed, I couldn’t tell. “Sure. I’d like that.”
We got back to the motel in about two minutes, breaking two states’ speed limits. We parked in the back, where we’d been before, and rushed around to the door, my arm around her waist.
While she was wiggling the key in the lock, I started to get a bad feeling.
The key had worked fine earlier.
Had we left a light on?
She pushed the door open and suddenly gasped. “Oh, shit.”
In the center of the bed, the long cardboard box with my name and address on it. Beside it, a fresh box of ammunition.
The phone rang.
Jack in the Box
1.
I picked up the phone and didn’t say anything. “Are you done wasting gasoline?” the female voice said. I turned on the recorder in my shirt pocket.
“Who are you?”
“You asked that before. I can’t tell you.”
“Then I can’t do anything for you.”
“Not to wax philosophical, but for whom were you working when you killed all those people in the desert?”
“I’m not going to go there.”
“You were killing people in order to stabilize the price of a barrel of oil. To use your own words.”
“I was drafted.”
“Yes, and as you’ve said, you could have gone to jail instead. You don’t have that option now.”
“Why don’t you just do the job yourself? You threaten me and Kit with murder. Why not just kill this poor schlub yourself?”
“That may be clear later.”
Kit had written a note: PLAY ALONG SEE WHAT THEY WANT.
I nodded, but could feel a slippery slope under my feet. “Maybe if you told me something about who the target is.”
“That’s progress. But not yet.”
“So at least tell me why you’re using me. There must be a thousand guys who would do it for pocket change.”
“You already know part of the reason. The rest will become clear.”
“Maybe if I knew who you were . . .”
“You will never know that.”
I took a deep breath. “So okay. Tell me what to do.” Kit’s eyes widened but she nodded, lips pursed.
“The first thing is to take that recorder out of your pocket and leave it on the end table. Second, put the rifle in the trunk of Ms. Majors’s car. Third, get a good night’s sleep. Finally, in the morning, keep driving south, toward the Gulf of Mexico.” She hung up.
“What is it?”
“Keep going south, she said. First get a good night’s sleep.”
“Sure. Lots of luck on that.”
I put the recorder on the end table. “And leave this, she said. I guess we should assume they can hear everything we say.”
She nodded. “I hope you all eat shit and die,” I said to the recorder. “I mean that sincerely. I want to watch.”
“I don’t know if we should provoke them,” she said quietly. “These people are crazy.”
“And I’m fucking getting there.”
__________
We hadn’t slept two hours when the sun started to show through the blinds. I set up the coffeemaker and we squeezed into the shower together, unsexily. One small bar of soap and no shampoo.
Over a breakfast of acid coffee and stale chocolate-chip cookies, she said it before I could: WE CAN’T HANDLE THIS BY OURSELVES, she wrote down. COPS OR FBI OR WHAT?
I nodded and wrote, HOMELAND SECURITY? ASSASSINATION? She thumbed a query on her iPak and showed me the screen: a map of Springfield, Illinois, with an arrow pointing to the Homeland Security office.
We didn’t say anything about it; just got in the car and headed east. It might have been an excess of caution, but we didn’t even use the car’s route guide; she’d drawn out a map on a piece of paper.
__________
About two hours of secondary roads through farmland and small towns, then a half hour on high-speed cruise, and we parked below an oblong grey building with extrusions like upside-down ells, which managed to look both heavy and arachnid.
“Imposing,” she said.
“Haunted by the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover. I don’t suppose we want to take the gun in with us.”
The reception area was arctic cold and government-grey. The room listing by the elevator didn’t have a Department of Mysterious Weapons Left in Cars, so we opted for Domestic Terrorism.
A matronly clerk listened to our story and settled us in a waiting room with a curious selection of magazines, a mixture of well-thumbed hunting and fishing journals with three pristine copies of Harvard Law Review, not the swimsuit edition. After more than an hour, she asked for my driver’s license and escorted us into the office of agent James “Pepper” Blackstone.
Blackstone was a slightly plump pale white man with aquiline features. He seriously studied us as we came in and sat down, and then glanced at the screen inlaid on his desktop. There was nothing else on the desk, and nothing on the walls but a standard picture of the president and a calendar.
“This rifle,” he said with no preamble, “we knew it was in your trunk, of course, before you got out of the car. If you’d tried to take it out of the trunk, you would have been stopped.”
“Good to know you guys are on the ball,” I said, and he didn’t react. “Of course the rifle is why we’re here.”
He looked at his screen.
“You found it in your car . . . twice?”
“Once outside my door,” I said. “I left it in Iowa City, in the trunk of a parked car, but someone evidently retrieved it and put it in our motel, while we went out for dinner last night
. They also broke into my apartment and took the mailing carton it had been in.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know! To scare me.”
He considered that for a long moment. “A preliminary investigation shows three sets of fingerprints.”
“You took it out of my car?” Kit said.
“It’s a weapon associated with a crime, Ms. Majors. We’re allowed to.” He didn’t look at her. “Your fingerprints, Mr. Daley, and those of the two Iowa state troopers. There are no other fingerprints at all, which is interesting. What is more interesting is that the surface of the rifle is completely sterile, outside of those points of contact. There’s not one nanogram of organic substance. It’s as if the weapon had been autoclaved and then put in the car’s trunk by someone wearing sterile gloves.”
“Not just wiped clean?” I said.
“No; that might obliterate the fingerprints, but there would still be traces of organic material, or perhaps of a solvent used to remove it. This was a very careful job.”
“Well, I’m glad it’s not just a bunch of amateurs.”
“I wouldn’t rule that out. Amateurs can be compulsive.” He took off his glasses and leaned back in his chair, which squeaked, and began a long soliloquy. “Being a writer, Mr. Daley, perhaps you can appreciate this: the tropes of terrorism and the mechanical aspects of spy business are so deeply imbedded in our culture that private citizens have used them to harass other private citizens; make them think they’re being followed by someone—us or the FBI, the CIA, the KGB . . . or some mysterious organization whose three initials are known only to a few. Ask yourself this: If you had the desire to do to someone else exactly what is being done to you . . . would it be impossible? Would it even be difficult? If you did have the desire and the money to spare.”
I thought for a second. “The rifle is common enough, though I’m not sure how I could buy one without leaving a paper trail. Hire somebody to do it; a mule, I guess. The phone calls could be made with throwaway cells. But these people know exactly what I’m doing, all the time, as if they were in the same room! How could I do that?”
There was a single knock at the door and a bland young man in a coat and tie strode in, put a manila folder on the desk, and left.
Blackstone spent a few seconds looking at each of three sheets of paper. “On June eleventh of last year, someone who looks like you and had your driver’s license bought that rifle at a sporting goods store in Des Moines.” He slid over one sheet, a grainy photograph apparently from a store’s security camera. A person who looked something like me was buying an M2010-AW9.
“That’s not me,” I said. “I mean, I know it’s not me because I wasn’t there; I’ve never been in that store. But it doesn’t really look like me, anyhow.”
He took the picture back and examined it. Shook his head and got a jeweler’s loupe from a drawer and looked again. “Maybe, maybe not. Can you explain the driver’s license?”
“Well, no. Not if they had the neutron-counting thing.” I’d been sent a new license a couple of years ago with the ID dot: traces of two radioactive elements, the proportions different for each person’s license, impossible to forge. Some small stores didn’t have the neutron counters, but probably all gun retailers did.
He handed me my license. “This checks out. It is the one that was used to buy the gun.” He looked at Kit. “Ms. Majors, you are a mathematician. You know Occam’s razor.”
I knew that one; the simplest explanation is probably the right one. But she knew the whole thing: “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.”
“Exactly. So for your story to be true, Mr. Daley, these are the entities: a miscreant had to steal your driver’s license before June eleventh, use it to buy a weapon, and return it undetected to your wallet before today. That is not impossible. But a simpler explanation is that the picture is you. And you had some arcane reason for setting this up.”
I looked at Kit. “That’s what I said you people would say. That it was just a publicity stunt.”
“Can you prove you were somewhere else on June eleventh?”
“June tenth is my birthday,” Kit said. “He took me out to dinner in Iowa City—did you use a credit card?”
“Probably.”
“That’s less than compelling. You could still be in Des Moines the next day.” He slid the picture an inch toward me. “I think the burden of proof is on you.”
“We slept together,” she said, her voice strained. “I was with him the next day, and he didn’t buy any gun.”
“Were you with him all day? Do you remember?”
“No, I wasn’t. That was a Wednesday and I taught at 10:00.”
He tapped the picture. “And you? Do you know where you were on that Wednesday?” He leaned forward and read the date stamp. “At 12:30 in the afternoon?”
“Hell, I probably slept in.” I took the picture and studied it. The guy was wearing clothes that could have come out of my closet, which proved nothing: jean jacket and blue jeans, white shirt.
“I don’t have boots like that,” I said, not expecting him to be impressed. “Wait, though . . . I looked it up, and a gun like this costs $2,600 new. I don’t have that kind of money to spend on anything. You can check my bank and credit card records.”
“We have, of course.” He slid over another sheet, with a scanned copy of a receipt. “You paid cash. There’s no record of your having withdrawn that amount, but . . .” He shrugged.
“Absence of proof is not proof of absence,” I supplied. “But if this were a publicity stunt, why didn’t I try to get some publicity?”
“I never used that word,” he said. “Many of the people who come through this office have done things for reasons I don’t understand—reasons they don’t understand.”
“So now I’m crazy.”
“That’s a layman’s term, Mr. Daley. Not very useful to us.”
“Who is ‘us’? Are you a shrink as well as an agent?”
He almost smiled. “In fact, I am an ‘analyst,’ but not a psychoanalyst. And all I meant was that perfectly reasonable people do things that are not reasonable—literally not for reason.
“In the absence of further evidence . . .” He took a business card out of a tray and handed it to me. “I’m afraid Mr. Occam has raised his razor. Do contact us if you have evidence of a law being broken.”
“It’s a sniper weapon, for Christ’s sake! You’re not concerned about a sniper weapon appearing and disappearing?”
“It’s a hunting rifle, a very popular model.” He leaned forward and put the card in my shirt pocket. “It has been returned to your trunk.”
“Along with a bug of some kind, I trust?”
“That’s not my department, Mr. Daley, but I sincerely doubt it. We have a lot of work to do without making more.” He peered into the desk screen. “Do let us know if you have a change of address or phone number. Good day?”
“You think this is some kind of a gag I set up?”
“Your words, Mr. Daley. Do you need help finding your way out?”
“You can’t . . .” A big black guy in a tight dark suit was walking toward us. “No. We’re outta here.”
“One thing, please,” Kit said in a strained voice. “How can you say for sure that this photo isn’t a fake? Please?”
He picked it up and scowled at it. “Any electronic image could be manufactured from the ground up, Ms. Majors, pixel by pixel.” He tapped the date stamp in the corner, with its bar code. “This part would be almost impossible, though. You would have to know the security protocols of the company that made the camera, just to start.”
“You could do it.”
“Homeland Security? No, we don’t have any facilities for that—or none that I know of. I suppose some other agency might—but the cost, to make a counterfeit security ima
ge that we couldn’t detect? Unless you’re a closet millionaire, or indeed some kind of super spy, no.” The black guy loomed next to him. “Thank you for your concern. You have been good citizens, bringing this to our attention. We’ll keep our eyes open.” His own eyes looked back down into the screen. The black guy’s eyes gestured toward the elevator.
The shimmering oven of the parking lot was momentarily a relief, after that huge tax-funded refrigerator. The asphalt was so hot it felt spongy.
“Do you think that’s it?” Kit said.
“I hope not. I mean, the guys who’re after us must know we’ve been here. That might up the ante.”
“Or they might decide to give up,” she said. “Rather than risk the wrath of James ‘Pepper’ Blackstone.”
“Whatever. I guess we want to drive slowly and leave a trail of bread crumbs.”
We paused in the shade of a tree, incongruously planted in the middle of the lot, and stood on its grass. “Suppose we’re wrong,” I said, “in assuming that your car is bugged.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, how could they have bugged it in Iowa City? They might have followed me to the Hamburger Haven. But there’s no way they could’ve known you’d stop there and drive off with me a few minutes later. Mess with your car in broad daylight. So it’s me they’re following, my body.”
“Or they were at the time,” she said. “They’ve had plenty of time to work on the car since.”
“Yeah. They probably buy bugs by the six-pack.” I suddenly felt nauseated. “What if it is my body? Like they put it in my food and it attached itself to my stomach.”
“Could they do that?”
“I don’t know. They can make them really small.”
“I mean, it would pass on through. Really. If something attached itself to your stomach or intestines, it would make you sick, wouldn’t it?”
I was dangerously close to demonstrating it. “The idea does. But hold it.” An idea was crystallizing. “You wouldn’t do that. You’d hide it in a muscle mass.”
“How could they do that without your knowledge?”
“In the hospital. Not here, but in fucking Germany!” She shook her head slightly, not following me. “When I was in the army—when I was wounded!”